Banham’s Four Ecologies Revisited: A series of images revisiting Reyner Banham’s view of Los Angeles thirty-five years after his seminal book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) was published. The book was considered not only one of the […]

Edited by Vinayak Bharne and Alan A. Loomis After the Second World War, cities devastated by the conflict had to rebuild themselves. Los Angeles, devastated by self-inflicted Urban Renewal, began the rebuilding process soon after. This issue examines the several […]

By reviewing Los Angeles through Banham’s now historic ecological categories (Autopia, Surfurbia, the Foothills, and the Plains of Id: each coined to lend clarity to an undefined, post-urban city), this year’s Portfolio artists present the ecologies one generation later, how both the city and the word “ecology” itself have evolved since the 1970s.

An essay describing the relationship between theme parks and modern American urbanism. This essay discusses how Reyner Banham’s autopia acts as a device for facilitating the melding of Jean Baudrillard’s hyper-reality, as embodied by themed environments such as Disneyland’s Main Street, into the true reality of urban Los Angeles.